Watching the Obamas Watch “A Raisin in the Sun”

On Thursday, the cast of the Broadway revival of “A Raisin in the Sun” was told that a “high-level official” would be coming to the show the next night. Who could it be? Kathleen Sebelius had just resigned—maybe she had more time for theatregoing? Word got out on Friday afternoon: the Obamas were coming to Broadway. By seven o’clock that night, Forty-Seventh Street had been partitioned off, and the Barrymore Theatre was swarming with security guys—not an unwelcome sight, after the Timesreported that Broadway has had a tough time attracting men.

This was not Obama’s first act of Presidential playgoing. In 2009, he and Michelle went on a date night to August Wilson’s “Joe Turner’s Come and Gone,” and the First Lady has brought her daughters to “Memphis” and “The Addams Family.” (Apparently, the President prefers drama to musicals.) One can only presume that considerations beyond taste determine his theatrical intake: nothing too risqué (“The Book of Mormon”) or too partisan (“All the Way”). Still, “A Raisin in the Sun” was more than a safe choice: it was an undeniably poignant one. It premièred in 1959, and made Lorraine Hansberry the first African-American woman to have a play produced on Broadway. The story follows a black family in Chicago preparing to move into a big, fancy house, despite resistance from their conservative white neighbors. (Sound familiar?) And its themes are as lofty and as loaded as Obama’s: upward mobility, the pain of progress, and, as Sarah Palin might put it (though Hansberry certainly did not), “that hopey, changey stuff.”

A white tent had been erected outside the theatre, and audience members were whisked through metal detectors and wanded. Inside, recordings of Hansberry played on a loop, and the Langston Hughes poem from which the play takes its title was illuminated on a scrim: “What happens to a dream deferred? / Does it dry up / like a raisin in the sun?” By 8:12 P.M., there were eight conspicuously empty seats off the center-right aisle, four in Row D and four in Row E. (I was in Row F, on the other side.) A woman announced over the speaker: “Ladies and gentlemen, out of respect for the actors please take your seats so the show can begin.” The lights went down, and the door to the street swung open. A stream of people, including the President, the First Lady (in black), and Valerie Jarrett, snaked through to the back of the house and then down the aisle. Ignoring the announcer’s pleas, the audience leaped to its feet—this usually happens at the end of the show—and camera flashes twinkled in the darkened theatre. The Obamas shook some hands and took their seats.

Then, a high-pitched tone pierced through the Barrymore: apparently, a Secret Service member had opened an emergency door and tripped an alarm. This being New York, elation quickly turned to grumbling; it was like being stuck on the subway during a blackout, except with the President of the United States. After a few minutes, the announcer returned: “Ladies and gentlemen, please note: this is not an emergency situation.” Phew! For about ten minutes, the audience sat in the pitch dark, with little to do but plug their ears and gawk. “I guess we’re finding out what happens to a dream deferred,” one woman deadpanned. A moment later, the screech finally subsided, to relieved applause. At 8:26 P.M., the show began.

It’s not often that a single member of the audience commands more attention than the action onstage, and in the initial minutes there was a jittery energy that distracted from the story. Denzel Washington got his usual entrance applause (and a few catcalls from the balcony). If it took a while to buy him as Walter Lee Younger, it wasn’t because Washington is twenty-four years older than his character: Obama’s Obama-ness somehow increased Denzel’s Denzel-ness. To the actors’ credit, the suspension of disbelief gradually set in, and we were transported to the South Side of Chicago in the fifties, watching a hardscrabble African-American household—the kind Obama might have visited as a community organizer. Walter, Sr., has died, and the Youngers are awaiting a ten-thousand-dollar life-insurance check: their ticket to a better life. When it arrives, they regard it with magisterial awe. In a way, the check became Obama’s onstage double—a symbol of promise onto which the characters project their aspirations. And yet Hansberry’s play isn’t as sanguine as a campaign speech. It’s about the undertow of hope, its agonizing slowness, as when Mama (the excellent LaTanya Richardson Jackson) says of her late husband:

Big Walter used to say, he’d get right wet in the eyes sometimes, lean his head back with the water standing in his eyes and say, “Seem like God didn’t see fit to give the black man nothing but dreams—but He did give us children to make them dreams seem worth while.”

At intermission, the Obamas went backstage to meet the cast, as patrons flooded the bar. Matt Hammond had been sitting in the rear mezzanine with his mother, Edie. “It’s wild how far we’ve come,” he said. “I’m waiting to text my friends: ‘The four most important African-Americans in the country are watching the same play,’ ” by which he meant the Hammonds and the Obamas. Larysa Gibson, who was sitting in the lounge with a glass of white wine, said she found out what was happening “when our cab couldn’t get close to the theatre.” She and her husband, Lee, had come from Cleveland for the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame induction ceremony, where they saw Cat Stevens, Stevie Nicks, and Sheryl Crow: “Not as famous as Obama, but as famous as Denzel.” Lee wandered up and added, “As long as nobody throws any shoes, we’ll be O.K.”

Act Two was sprinkled with unspoken moments of meta-theatre. When Walter asks his son, Travis, what he wants to be when he grows up, the boy says, “Bus driver.” His father urges him to dream bigger, and the words “President of the United States” seemed to waft in the air momentarily. By then, Mama Younger has used part of the insurance money for the down payment on a house in the all-white neighborhood Clybourne Park. An emissary from the Clybourne Park Improvement Association (David Cromer) comes to bribe the Youngers into staying away. Calling himself “the welcoming committee,” he explains that “most of the trouble exists because people just don’t sit down and talk to each other”—shades of the “bipartisanship” the President has enjoyed with Congress. The offer divides the Youngers, now torn between idealism and cynicism. Walter’s sister, Beneatha (Anika Noni Rose), who has anti-assimilationist views, spars with her Nigerian love interest, Asagai (Sean Patrick Thomas). Imagine Obama ruminating over this exchange:

BENEATHA: Don’t you see there isn’t any real progress, Asagai, there is only one large circle that we march in, around and around, each of us with our own little picture in front of us—our own little mirage that we think is the future.

ASAGAI: That is the mistake…It isn’t a circle—it is simply a long line—as in geometry, you know, one that reaches into infinity. And because we cannot see the end—we also cannot see how it changes.

Or Mama Younger, reminding Beneatha to love her brother (who has squandered the rest of the insurance money), even when his household poll numbers are low:

Child, when do you think is the time to love somebody the most? When they done good and made things easy for everybody? Well, then, you ain’t through learning—because that ain’t the time at all. It’s when he’s at his lowest and can’t believe in hisself ‘cause the world done whipped him so!

In the end, the Youngers take the house, defying the enmity of the “welcoming committee.” They are the change they’ve been waiting for. Mama packs up a portrait of Walter, Sr., just as Walter, Jr., is learning to live up to his aspirations. (“Dreams from My Father” could have been the play’s subtitle.) At the curtain call, the Obamas joined the audience in a standing ovation, and Denzel Washington tipped his fedora to the President, flashing his matinee-idol grin.

The Obamas were whisked away, and the cast headed across the street for a celebratory drink. “I was giddy all night,” David Cromer said on his way out. “I thought about what it would have been for the playwright to know about him and that he was here.” LaTanya Richardson Jackson had performed for the President before—she was in “Joe Turner’s Come and Gone”—and has known him since his Senate run. “They loved it,” she said. “I don’t want to say they’re coming back, but Michelle is trying to come back with her mom.” (Another parallel: the Youngers live with a Grandma-in-Chief.) Anika Noni Rose, who was the voice of the first black Disney princess, in “The Princess and the Frog,” said, “What was amazing was the amount of applause and energy at the top of the play. It was, like, get ready for a prize-winning fight. Let’s go, let’s go, let’s go!” Scott Rudin, the powerhouse producer, said, “I pretty much cried the whole time.”

Bryce Clyde Jenkins, the thirteen-year-old who plays Travis Younger, was still beaming. “I was in school at 11:08 when my teacher, Miss Bernadette, pulled it up on the computer that the First Lady and the President were coming to the performance tonight,” he said. “I kind of jumped for joy inside myself.” Did he find it hard to concentrate onstage? “No,” Jenkins said. “We have a responsibility to the people who are in the show and the Obamas to put on a good show and treat them like they’re our last audience.”